The Story
OrganizerThe Goa Arts and Literature Festival (GALF) was founded in 2010 (some organiser accounts cite 2009 as the year of conception) by co-curators Damodar Mauzo, the Konkani writer who later won the 2022 Jnanpith Award, India's highest literary honour, and journalist Vivek Menezes, both members of the Goa Writers' Group. The festival is organised by the International Centre, Goa (ICG) in association with the Goa Writers' Group, with support from the Directorate of Art and Culture and, in some years, the Department of Tourism, Government of Goa. Held annually each December (shifting to January or February in more recent editions), GALF is free and unticketed, and has deliberately retained a comparatively small, intimate scale even as its reputation has grown, hosting Sahitya Akademi and Jnanpith award winners, Man Booker Prize nominees, and a Nobel laureate (economist Abhijit Banerjee, 2023 edition) alongside strong representation of Goan, Konkani and North-Eastern Indian writers. The festival paused during the Covid-19 pandemic; its 11th edition, in January 2023, was explicitly framed by organisers as a 'comeback edition' marking the festival's survival through that gap.
GALF's significance rests on its explicit founding mission: correcting what its curators described as an 'alarming lack of recognition' of Goan literature, across its multiple languages (Konkani, Marathi, Portuguese-legacy writing, English), within India's broader literary landscape. It has maintained a consistent focus on writers from the geographic and linguistic margins of India's literary mainstream, Dalit writers, North-Eastern Indian languages, Kashmir, alongside its core Goan programming, a stated editorial choice by its curators rather than an incidental feature. Structurally, it is a volunteer-driven, non-profit, non-ticketed festival that has deliberately avoided scaling into a mass-market event, a choice its co-curator Vivek Menezes has described as one of its primary accomplishments, distinct from the growth-oriented model of most large Indian literary festivals.
GALF is confirmed active, having run its most recent documented edition in February 2025 with a keynote from Sahitya Akademi winner Shanta Gokhale and appearances by historian Manu Pillai and journalist William Dalrymple, and its 2026 edition is already being promoted by organisers. For institutional and CSR audiences, GALF is a useful example of a genuinely small-scale, community- and volunteer-driven literary festival sustained through state cultural-department support and an educational institute (ICG) rather than corporate sponsorship, one that has explicitly chosen depth and linguistic diversity over scale as its measure of success.
Bridges Indian, South Asian and Portuguese-speaking literary worlds.
